Thursday, July 14, 2011

There is so much anger right now. In me, my friends, my city and probably innumerable people outside of it. My already wounded city has been wounded again. Serial blasts. Again. Hardly had my city completely recovered that they do this again. People are abusing the terrorists, the government, the police and each other. I have lived my entire life in this city and I know it's alive.

It doesn't take a long time for someone to fall for Mumbai. Much has been written in books (my favorite being Shantaram- a MUST read), but for me, who was born and brought up here, it did take a long time to actually realise what this city did for me. I practically spent 17 years of my life in my colony itself, which itself is like a township, very self-sufficient. My school, my friends, my tutions, hospitals, shops everything was here and I never paid much attention to the world outside it. But it was after that, when I went to college, that the city touched me, embraced me or more appropriately swallowed me whole. :)

They say Mumbai is the city of dreams. I don't know about that, but what I know is that it sure gives you dreams. It's a city of paradoxes, a city of extreme highs and lows, of beauty and murk, of desire and despair, of compassion and hatred.....but once you come here you can't fully and completely leave. It stays with you. When you walk in the by-lanes and randomly run your fingers on those old rusty fences along the road and when you run on the jam packed platforms to catch a train and when you wait for what seem like years on the bus stops only to be squished in the one that finally comes, if you shut up the thoughts in your head and the music from your phone, you can hear it's rhythm....it's slow but palpable rhythm. It's alive. Even after so many blasts and bullets aiming to rip it apart, it survives. It survives in all those people who get up the next morning and take trains, some of which were blown up on 7th July, and buses and taxis and go back to work, walk the same roads that the terrorists took while pounding people with bullets.

People say children born in Afghanistan and Iraq in the past decade or so have grown up with the sounds of bullets and missiles....maybe we have become numb...to these blasts and to terrorists and to our own 'politicians' sucking away on our blood and souls......Yes, something needs to be done....Yes.....this fire to do something stays on for a couple of weeks and the dies out...waiting for the next such incident to re-ignite it...

My heart breaks time and again seeing my city, my home wither away like this.....It pains me so much to see all the despair and hopelessness...I, like the rest of my city, bleed each time they come and take away a piece of my city's soul....the rhythm, the beating heart of my city seems slower, fainter....Yes, something has to be done....my home, our home is dying....